Considering the systems engineering leading indicators to improve project performance measurement

With a long history in project management practices, project performance measurement (PPM) offers a wide range of methods and good practices which help project managers to effectively monitor the project and evaluate project progress and results. However, several critical issues remain, such as an unbalanced development of KPIs types or a limited availability of leading Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). On the other hand, systems engineering measurement (SEM) is a more recent discipline, with practices and theories that appeared with the emergence of the systems engineering discipline. Moreover, SEM has been much more developed with some practical research results published in several standards and guides. In particular, SEM does not only use lagging indicators, used to track how things are going but defines methods to promote leading indicators, used as precursors to the direction where the engineering is going; indeed, 18 leading indicators (LIs) were recently proposed, validated, and finally engineered in a practical guidance. Our goal being to improve project performance and success rate, one mean is to improve the project performance measurement, on which decisions rely for project management. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes to extend the project performance measurement of indicators by considering how performance is measured in systems engineering.